Bilingual Insights into the Initial Lexicon

The Role of Cognates in Word Acquisition

Gonzalo Garcia-Castro

PhD Defence / Departament de Medicina i Ciències de la Vida

2024-11-03

Average English-native 20-year-old knows ~42,000 words: mental lexicon

Lexical representations
Phonological, conceptual, grammatical information of known words

Overview

  • Introduction:
  • From speech sounds to words
  • Bilingualism and its challenges
  • The role of phonology (cognateness)
  • Study 1: AMBLA model, acquisition of cognates, role of language exposure
  • Study 2: language non-selectivity in the initial bilingual lexicon
  • Discussion

The initial lexicon

  1. From sounds to lexical representations
  2. Vocabulary spurt
  3. Early dynamics of lexical processing

From sounds to lexical representations

From sounds to lexical representations

Lexical representation: (at least) form-meaning association


Parental reports

e.g., MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al. 1994)

Vocabulary growth

Vocabulary size grows non-linearly during the second year of life

Figure 1: Vocabulary size norms for 51,800 monolingual children learning 35 distinct languages (wordbank)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

Cascaded activation: activation spreads across non-selected lexical representations (Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus 1998)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

In children (Chow, Davies, and Plunkett 2017)

The bilingual lexicon

  • Challenges a bilingual environment
  • Bilingual words acquisition
  • Cognateness
  • Language non-selectivity

Challenges a bilingual environment

  • Increased complexity in linguistic context (learning two codes)
  • Reduced linguistic input (split into two languages)
  • Increased referential ambiguity
  • Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals (Sebastian-Galles and Santolin 2020)

Bilinguals acquire words at similar rates as monolinguals (Hoff et al. 2012)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Lexically closer languages ➡️ Larger vocabulary size (Floccia et al. 2018)

English-Dutch > English-Mandarin

Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)

Cognate Non-cognate
[cat] /ˈgat-ˈgato/ [dog] /ˈgos-ˈpe.ro/

Cognates acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2023; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 2: Pairwise lexical similarity

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 3: Aggregated vocabularies might conceal facilitation effects

What mechanisms support a cognate facilitation during word acquisition?

Language non-selective lexical access

Study 1

Cognate beginnings to lexical acquisition (under review)

Introduction

  • Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals in vocabulary growth
  • The presence of cognates seems to facilitate vocabulary acquisition
  • Language co-activation has been suggested to underlie this phenomenon
  • Mechanisms supporting the role of co-activation in cognate acquisition are unclear

Language non-selectivity

Activation spreads across non-selected representations in both languages, through phonological and conceptual links. (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, and Sebastian-Galles 2000)

Evidence in children (Bosma and Nota 2020; De Houwer, Bornstein, and Putnick 2014) and infants (Von Holzen and Mani 2012; Jardak and Byers-Heinlein 2019; Singh 2014).

Language non-selectivity

Language non-selectivity

The AMBLA model

Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition (AMBLA)

  1. Information about form-meaning mappings is provided by learning instances.
  • Exposure to a word-form that results in the accumulation of information about its meaning
  1. Age of acquisition: the infant accumulates a threshold (\(c\)) amount of learning instances for a word-form

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{grey}{RGB}{128, 128, 128} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ {\color{mygreen}\text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij}} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid {\color{myred}\text{Learning instances}_{ij}} = {\color{myblue}c} \}\\ \color{myred}{\text{Learning instances}_{ij}} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \\ \textbf{where:} \\ {\color{myblue}c} &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \end{aligned} \]

Exposure

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{myorange}{RGB}{ 235, 127, 26 } \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c \}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot {\color{myred}\text{Exposure}_{ij}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ c &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \end{aligned} \]

  1. Words accumulate additional information from the co-activation of their (phonologically similar) translation equivalent

Cognateness

Learning instances for one word-form may result in the accumulation of information for its translation equivalent

Degree of income additional information proportional to the phonological similarity between both translation equivalents (Levenshtein distance)

\[ \begin{aligned} \definecolor{myred}{RGB}{ 168, 0, 53 } \definecolor{myblue}{RGB}{ 0, 64, 168 } \definecolor{mygreen}{RGB}{0, 168, 87} \definecolor{myorange}{RGB}{ 235, 127, 26 } \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c \}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \text{Exposure}_{ij} \cdot {\color{myred}\text{Cognateness}_{j}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ c &= 300 \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ {\color{myred}\text{Cognateness}}&{\color{myred}=\text{Levenshtein}(j, j')} \end{aligned} \]

Methods

Barcelona Vocabulary Questionnaire (BVQ)

Participants

Data processing

Modelling approach and statistical inference

Results

Regression coefficients

Figure 4: Posterior distribution of fixed regression coefficients

Marginal effects

Figure 5: Posterior marginal effects

Discussion

Study 2

Developmental trajectories of bilingual spoken word recognition

Introduction

Experiment 1

N = 112 children (15 longitudinal)

Average age 26.36 months (SD = 4.01, Range = 20.03–32.5)

English monolinguals, Oxford (United Kindgom)

Figure 6: Participant receptive vocabulary sizes across ages and language profiles.

Design

Results

Figure 7: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Experiment 2

Participants

Stimuli

Procedure

Results (monolinguals)

Figure 8: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Results (bilinguals)

Figure 9: Time course of target fixations in Experiment 1.

Discussion

Thanks

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